Tag Archives: extractive economy

It seems a lot of retired men take up woodworking. At Santa Fe Community College (SFCC) I have met quite a few. Some are immensely talented and/or just have a huge storehouse of knowledge and experience. As with many fields of endeavor, only time and talent limit the depth and breadth of understanding possible in woodworking.

One of the most skilled of those I’ve met at SFCC is a woman who retired from a career as an ethnographer. In the typical class of 12 in the woodshop, ‘elder’ know-how is balanced by some very creative younger talent. It is a great experience to work with these folks. The environment is remarkably cooperative and supportive. Ideas and knowledge are shared; polite critiques and useful suggestions organically emerge from conversations about how to approach a problem of joinery, finishing technique or aesthetic design as a project evolves. It brings to mind an ideal image of how apprenticeships might have worked in shops producing for local communities and regional trade in the pre-industrial pre-corporate world of clear-air and artistry.

Industrial Furniture Production

Craftsmanship is not quite a lost art, though it might seem so. Industrial production, with its outsourced cheap mostly unskilled labor and highly automated production processes, has resulted in an overabundance of unimportant transitory products. Have you ever really thought about why a cable-television program such as “Storage Wars” exists? So many people in so many suburbs across America have accumulated so much stuff, that a whole industry has developed just to store the overflow.

The glut of unused abandoned yet “valuable” consumer products that people are not yet willing to call waste, produces the ‘demand’ for all those commercial storage lockers. Without such ‘pre-waste’ there would be no need to find space for the overflow from garages where no cars can be parked because of the clutter.

Excessive extraction of materials needed to produce all that stuff, using gigantic mining and earth-moving equipment is seriously straining many living Earth systems, disrupting otherwise stable ecologies. The quantities of energy used, from mining to shipping to manufacturing to shipping again to warehousing to super-store display, are hard to grasp. It is all mechanized and automated to reduce labor costs in order to supply cheap stuff to feed the consumer culture. And they call it “progress.”

The whole global process is, of course, disrupting climate to a point fast approaching catastrophic collapse and global chaos. Too many “environmentalists” think we can fix the problem with new technology and substituting depleting resources with new materials. Instead of cutting back on their profligate consumerism, they want to “fix” the environment by recycling over-used materials and using just as much energy from more “sustainable” sources.

Instead, they could choose to live a less carbon-intensive “low-tech” life, buying only what they really need, goods the production of which is labor intensive rather than capital intensive. That would, of course, entail more work and more jobs. It would also entail a new great transformation in the way we live in relation to the planet and each other.

What if we all re-focused on smaller scale production of higher quality useful goods that last and require us to apply craftsmanship in their making? Many human-scale tools are available that require no energy inputs except those of the human head and hand to get the same work done.

Nutrient Rich Organic Produce

Oh, but that would take more time to produce. Yes, and that would mean jobs, jobs, jobs! Everyone could have one. More people are turning to human-scale production. As it turns out, small organic farms are significantly more productive than giant factory farms are. They also restore soils to a natural state in which they provide the nutrients missing in industrial agriculture. Given the power of the neo-liberal corporate industrial economy, making the transition to a viable low carbon emissions future is the hard part. We have the tools. We just need to figure out how to transform extractive economies into ecological communities.

The experience of making meaningful things (or performing meaningful services) is exactly what is missing in our declining perpetual-growth industrial economy and is exactly the economic model needed for mitigation of climate chaos and for ecological restoration. Look for hand-crafted products, locally made. Become a “locavore.” It’s our choice: Creativity or Catastrophe.

Public concern over the possible spread of the Ebola virus epidemic from West Africa to the U.S. is growing. While the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is taking various precautions, the situation is nevertheless of sufficient complexity to warrant concern. The outrage over the police killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown continues as a grand jury takes its time mulling over evidence. The Wall Street pundits on CNBC and the corporate economists claim the economy is turning around, yet most people are having trouble feeling it. What do these seemingly disparate events have in common?

It’s really quite simple. Each of these situations represents a larger problem that pervades our society. Ever since the Reagan presidency, well, ever since the economic reforms following the Great Depression, the power elites have tried to wrest economic and political control from the citizenry. The push to privatize public functions has succeeded in reducing the public interest in social and economic conditions to an afterthought. Importantly, these are only three examples among many. The corporate controlled political culture has carefully failed to recognize the public interest as a legitimate concern for citizens. Meanwhile, the cult of “free market” extractive economics has raised the specter of private greed to a nearly religious status.

Privatizing Public Health
The interest in public health as a concern for the entire society is almost universally recognized bymost nations, even those unable to provide adequate health resources. Universal healthcare is found in nearly every ‘advanced’ industrial nation, except in the U.S.A. With far lower costs, Europeans produce far better health outcomes for their citizens than we do and nobody is excluded. On many indicators of health and well being, we are down toward the bottom of the rankings. Further, in the interest of privatizing every public function imaginable, our politicians have been cutting budgets for the CDC and other public health institutions. But wait, there’s more.

Since the entire U.S. medical sector is organized around private profit for doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, and the pharmaceutical industry, only drugs deemed able to garner very high prices are developed. Flu vaccines are widely available in the U.S., since they are promoted by every medical institution and drugstore in the nation, subsidized by the federal government and profitable for Big Pharma. Ebola has been around for years. Some effort was made to develop a vaccine, but it was abandoned; little profit was projected. Public policy has not been driven by the public interest.

Jim Crow Law Enforcement
Ferguson is a symptom of a national failure to shape law enforcement policy in the public interest. Similar situations abound nationwide. Several trends converge to implement a destructive pattern resulting in what is best described as Incarceration Nation. The New Jim Crow, as aptly described by Michele Alexander, has created a caste of economically exiled men of color. The so-called war on drugs has been a war on young people of color prosecuted by increasingly militarized police targeting vulnerable neighborhoods.

Police no longer serve the public interest; they serve their interests in gaining funding and military equipment useful only for controlling an enemy population. The citizen is the new enemy and the police are the occupying force, as SWAT teams even serve minor warrants by heavily armed home invasion – innocents die. The bifurcation of police and public is palpable. Only a massive reorganization of police from top administration to recruitment, education, training and strict accountability of officers can come to serve the public good.

The Banksters and the Booty
The history of money is a mystery to most Americans. So is its current incarnation. But the essence of money is its function as a public medium of exchange. In societies where money is/was issued by the government to facilitate exchange of goods and services, economies have operated with stable prices and little taxation. Where money creation has been handed over to privately held central banks, governments have gone deeper into debt and taxes have grown to pay this arbitrary public debt.

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 put the U.S. on the path of a debt-based money system. Instead of issuing money for public purposes, the government still borrows money from the central bank it authorized to issue money. There are many other absurdities in the U.S. debt-driven economy, but the basic problem is the same. A fundamental public function – issuing and managing the money supply for the nation – was given to a privately held central bank, which extracts booty in the form of interest and fees for the money it is allowed to create from nothing in its electronic accounts. Only public banks will manage money to serve the public interest.

Public Institutions for the Public Interest
Health, law enforcement, and the economic policies, among others, are three core elements of society that are inherently public functions. Their ‘privatization’ incurs extra costs and destabilizes the economy. In each of these areas, and others, we need public control over decisions in order to serve the public good. Until these important functions are returned to the people and their government, the plundering of the commons will continue.